Red Thunder

In that part of Louisiana, it was common to be deeply religious yet far from saintly. A lot went out and raised some hell on Saturday night. Maybe that was the reason such extreme measures were thought necessary the following day, as if simple prayers and pleas would not be enough.

One night when he was twenty-two, dead drunk and coked to the eyeballs, Avery had gone out to the parking lot of the Gables, a local after-hours bucket of blood, to square off with Alphonse Hebert. Avery thought the matter should be settled with fists, and Avery was the best man with his fists for a good ten miles around. Hebert must have heard that, because he drew a revolver and fired all six shots at Avery from a distance of no more than six feet. Avery, suddenly cold sober but no more able to move than a jacklighted deer, stood there and pissed himself, then felt all over his body for bullet holes, then fell to his knees and began to pray as three of his brothers worked Hebert over with pool cues and boots, and the rest of the patrons of the Gables stood around and watched, the general feeling being that Hebert was getting no more than he deserved.

Now, while it was agreed that Hebert was easily plotzed enough to miss at that range, he was unlikely to miss with all six. And examining the bullet holes later, it surely did appear that most of that lead ought to have been slowed down appreciably by various parts of Avery before hitting the clapboard wall behind him, which would have been good [93] news for old Charlie Wilson, who soaked up two of the bullets after they came through the wall, one with his chest and the other with his head, and as a result gave up drinking and never quite walked right for the rest of his life.

“It weren’t no burnin’ bush, no,” Avery later told anyone who would listen. “But I knows de hand a God when I sees it, oh yes.” He swore off liquor, fornication, and fighting, which left quite a gap in his social life, as aside from sleeping, eating, and working as a roughneck on an offshore drilling rig when he needed money, drinking, fighting, and screwing other men’s wives was about all he did.

He filled the gaps with marriage and praying and preaching. He became even less employable than he had been before the miracle, as he could seldom go through an entire day without getting into a heated argument with his boss or a customer or fellow worker about religion. He never hesitated to point out sin, which did not make him popular. He moved deeper into the swamp and started in on a family.

Evangeline had been picked for the fertility of her lineage more than beauty or brains, as she had little of either, but she was fertile and prolific, and able to work like a horse even when eight and a half months gone. And that was good, because she spent the next fifteen years pregnant, giving birth usually in March or April, usually on a Sunday, and three times on Easter Sunday itself. Avery and Evangeline had seven sons: Veneration, Jubilation, Celebration, Sanctification, Exaltation, Consecration, and Hallelujah. They had five daughters, all named Gloria: Gloria Patri, Gloria Filly, Gloria Spiritusanctu, Gloria Inexcelsis, and Gloria Monday. They lost three, a boy and two girls, stillborn.

Most people in town knew the legend of how their youngest, Hallelujah, got his name. There had been complications in his birth and, against his better judgment, Avery had taken Evangeline into town, where Hallelujah had been delivered by C-section. When the doctor told her she would not be able to have any more children, Evangeline had shouted out the infant’s name on the spot.

Jubilation, known to everyone but his father as Jubal, was six the [94] first time Avery saw Jesus. From that moment the lives of the Avery Broussard clan became a race to see if any would grow large enough to fend off their father before his increasing insanity killed them all.

Avery was called to the pastorship of the Holy Bible Church of the Redeemed when the previous preacher succumbed to multiple spider bites from a brown recluse he was attempting to swallow. He had become allergic to the spider’s venom, and expired on the altar from anaphylactic shock.

Being called to lead the flock of the Redeemed didn’t require a certificate from any seminary. It was mostly a matter of stepping forward and taking the microphone from the cooling hand of the previous shepherd and starting to preach. Avery bellowed for two hours that night, without notes, quoting long passages from the Bible, and when the last hymn of the night had been sung it was clear there would be no challenge to his leadership.

From the first Avery was never shy about his meetings with Jesus. A small number of his parishioners left the church, feeling his descriptions of the Son of God to be blasphemous, but about twice their number heard of Avery’s wonderful stories about what it was like to literally walk with Jesus, and joined up. So in the early years, Avery’s church thrived.

And the stories were wonderful. Avery didn’t just walk with Jesus, he fished with him and hunted with him, too. He declared Jesus to be the best shot he’d ever seen with a.22, and he’d hunted with hundreds of men, in pretty near every parish in southern Louisiana. If Jesus saw a squirrel a hundred yards away, that squirrel was doomed. And Jesus didn’t look much like that sad sack fairy-boy all y’all seen nailed to a cross or praying in Gethsemane looking like he needed a good dose of Ex-lax, either, Avery told his congregation, nor did he wear hippie robes and beatnik sandals. Jesus walked the bayous in good, sturdy work boots. He wore J. C. Pe

[95] Avery’s idea of education was fairly simple. He believed in the three R’s, but not too much of any of them.

He figured a person had to know how to read the Bible or he would be at a severe disadvantage in life. To that end he laboriously taught his three eldest children their ABC’s and had them play an old “Hooked on Phonics” tape over and over again on a thrift-store Walkman. It was all he could do. His own reading skills were not the best, though his memory was phenomenal.

He knew how to sign his name, so his children learned, too. Any efforts beyond that, he felt, were strictly advanced classes for special credit.

He felt a person had to be able to count money, to not get shortchanged and to render unto Caesar all that you can’t hide from Caesar. So his children played counting games with real coins and Monopoly money.

Teaching them to read brought up a special problem, though, to Avery’s way of thinking. Like many of his neighbors, he did not allow his children to go to the picture shows or watch the television set. Avery, as he so often did, took things a little further. The only thing in the world worth reading, and therefore the only book his children would read, was the Holy Bible.

Jubal taught himself to read at the age of three by watching over his father’s shoulder as he took them through their daily Bible lesson. His father was delighted at first. He began letting Jubal do most of the reading.

But when he heard his son had started to hang around with his cousin Travis, Avery became suspicious. Everybody knew Travis was too smart for his own britches, and in Avery’s experience, that smartass attitude could be catching.

Once Jubal realized that his ability to read the Bible carried over to hundreds of other books and magazines and newspapers, he was lost. He set out to read every book in Louisiana.

Travis got him off to a good start by loaning Jubal his textbooks, which the boy read in a night, and by checking books out of the junior [96] high school library. Jubal had to stash them in a secret hideout he built, and read them by the light of a kerosene lamp in the middle of the night. Sometimes Travis joined him. It was the best time of Jubal’s life.